Things change very quickly in the web design / SEO world. That includes the needs and preferences of your clients too. How the Google algorithms work are developing at an ever increasingly fast pace, so the important factors like how Google crawls and indexes your website are increasingly important too.

That's the reason why that some SEO agencies decide to outsource their own web design services to others just so they can keep up with the latest in tech design and user behaviour today. One thing is certain above all others and that's that web design and web development isn't going anywhere soon!

If you have plans on starting a web design business, or already do, it's ever more important to know about the essential web design tools you'll need to make use of for your clients. There is now a race on of sorts of what kind of services you can provide to your clients. So you're going to have to ask yourself if you have the tools and knowledge on how to use those tools that you're offering to people.

So here are 5 essential web design tools that you may need and want to arm yourself and your SEO and or web design business with today:

1: WordPress

WordPress is without a doubt, the world's biggest CMS (Content Management System). And this makes it the go to platform for any good web designers out there that are worth their salt. Especially those that need to provide their clients with a system that can cater for people that come from many different industries already.

Talking market share among websites that use a CMS. WordPress holds about 64% of it. That equates to around a third of the Internet being built upon this CMS platform. And when it comes to the look, aesthetics and design of WP, it literally has thousands of themes and plugins that give users and designers a vast plethora to choose from.

That gives you tons of choices on the look and use of your WP website in ways that can be exactly custom tailored to your own style and needs. WP (WordPress) makes building a website much less tricky and complicated than it needs to be simply because of the whole array of themes and plugins you have at your disposal.

There are other options out there other than WP of course, such as Shopify or Weebly which give you a kind of simple drag n' drop option that make making a website quick and snappy. However while these are all tools that are made for ecommerce, WP is hands down the best one of them all.

2: Figma

Are you looking for something that can effectively and efficiently design UP prototypes quickly and easily? Then you should consider using Figma for it. Figma is a free, web based, prototyping tool. It's mainly a web based tool (you use it in your browser) but there is a desktop version of it too. And you can use it on multiple different OS's too.

Figma is known as one of the best collaborative design projects tools out there to date. And it provides all of the tools you'll ever need mostly, for when designing something. The only thing about using Figma is that you'll need to be online in order to use it as you can't use it offline.

That said, Figma comes with a myriad of features including:

• Gives you access to hundreds of different fonts, shapes and colours for your graphic designs.
• Lets you fully customize your graphic designs so they look more like yours.
• Lets you do it all online in your web browser of choice so no need to install anything.
• Lets you fully inspect and export CSS straight from your design file.
• Lets you mirror your designs on mobile as well as desktop.
• Lets you adjust the size of your designs screens and frames to see how it looks on other platforms.

Using Figma with its robust features, it makes it much easier to bring your web design and web layout ideas to life. Also with its team cantered workflow you can get people's insights and feedback much quicker too. Also if you're working with flat and or vector based images, and the interface isn't to your liking, you can use the Sketch feature which should make it easier for you.

3: Photoshop

Without a doubt, Photoshop is used by most web designers, both intermediate and highly skilled ones simply because of all the features that it comes with. If you're a web design agency then having access to or owning a decent photo and image editing tool is a must have! But you'll need to find the right one for your team and business to be comfortable with. Even if you do outsource all of your web designing to other people, having a decent photo editing tool around, in order to quickly do something like rescale or adjust some colours is extremely handy!

Using Photo shop lets you do many things included and not limited to:

1. Change, adjust and manipulate images and photos: When it comes to making major changes and adjustments to an image or photo, Photoshop let you do this in class.
2. Optimize images and photos: You can can save your images in many different formats as well as compress large images so that they fit the need for your site.
3. Create different types of web elements: Photoshop is extremely flexible in terms of what you can do with it making it a very good all-round software to have.
4. Create any kind of graphic: Photoshop gives you the ability to create all manner of website buttons, banners and icons and other types of material like flyers, logos and more.
5. Create any kind of web layout: Although I've mentioned how Figma is a highly recommended tool for building web layouts, Photoshop can also be used for this purpose too. That includes the actual framework that designers can use in determining where objects in a web page will be placed to. As well as how the proportions will look also.

Photoshop is probably a better choice when it comes to dealing with the more intricate and detailed designs for a web page. But it's not the only tool out there that lets you do these tasks and so much more. Yet it is one of the most powerful of them all since it lets you do these things and more in a much more varied way of things. Knowing the ins and outs of Photoshop will let you know how to create designs that are much more efficiently suited for the Internet when you compare it to using other tools.

4: Pexels

If you're looking for a better and free Shutterstock alternative then look no further than Pexels. Pexels is a very reliable source for high quality stock photos and images that you can use for free. For both personal and commercial purposes. All photos and videos on Pexels are free to use and giving attribution credit to the photographer or Pexels isn't necessary or required. You can freely modify the images, photos or videos to be as creative as you want to be!

The only thing you can't do with images and photos from Pexels is use them in a way that brings people into a bad light or offensively. You can't sell the unaltered images or photos, videos etc or use them in physically printed posters/flyers etc. And you can't imply the endorsement of them. And can't redistribute or sell them on other stock photo websites.

That said, Pexels have a wide array of professional photos you can use in your web design projects and campaigns and is one of the best free alternatives to Shutterstock that I've ever found!

5: Compressor.io

The size of an image can have an affect on your website's SEO rankings. All because Google prefers websites that load fast. So having images on your site that are large in size and take a long time to load could mean that Google will choose to not rank your website as high in the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages) and instead choose to rank other websites who's images load faster higher than yours.

So image compressors such as Compressor.io can help to drastically reduce the file size of your images by as much as 10%. Which will make your web pages load up in people's browsers a bit faster. It's very important to compress your images and that's what this website can do for them.

The Conclusion

Depending on how complex your project is, you'll need to use the right tools based on this. So don't be afraid to play around with them and become overwhelmed by them. You should test them out and see which ones work better for your team and then learn to master them. Especially if you plan to or will be doing a lot of web design work. And the kind of work that comes with doing digital marketing and SEO. You will have the option to outsource these things to those experts that have the tools and know how to do them. But that is all going to cost extra money down the line. By learning how to use these tools, you'll not only save money but also learn new skills which you can use on your own web design projects and that of your clients too.

Author:  IdealMike
Main Service:  50 Million Group Advertising